The masterminds at AT&T U-Verse have gone to a great deal of time and expense to provide their valued customers with comprehensively incorrect information regarding how to send a non-ATT.NET email through the SMTP provided at smtp.att.yahoo.com. If you use your own email address such as me@mybusiness.com and have landed here, you are not insane, even though you probably want to bang your head against the wall at this point. You have just been supplied with remarkably bad information by your new U-Verse support.

Here is the fancy version of the incorrect information regarding sending your emails though smtp.att.yahoo.com. Here is the more pedestrian and also completely useless instruction page for sending through smtp.att.yahoo.com. The useless information I am linking to is for Outlook Express. For incorrect information regarding other email agents, find the link for "personalize your support".

If you call U-Verse support on the phone, they can not help you because they don't know how to set it up themselves. If you are reading this in the India U-Verse support basement and want to actually help the clueless and deeply frustrated individual on the phone who you are trying desperately to make go away, please read the following to them, word for word:

In the top right, look for "Hi, please sign in" (this will probably change soon because it is so vague and absurd, so if it's not there look for some way to log in). Click those login words.

Your user name is the email address you gave yourself at ATT.NET when the friendly person came to install your U-Verse equipement. Your password is the password you assigned to that ATT.NET email address. If you do not know this crucial information, you are most-likely without hope at this point and should probably just forget about it and give up.

After logging in, do not click on the MAIL button because that would be WAY too obvious.

Instead, click on Member Center (as of January 2013, this link has been moved under the MORE button up top, to make this process even more confounding).

Then, because this thing really is just awful, log in again! Same credentials as before.

Now, under the "Contact Information" area on the left, click on "Update Contact Information".

You will see your ATT.NET email address on that page and a tiny little link under that for Add Email. Click that.

Add your actual email addresses in there.(me@mybusiness for example).

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Note that if your email address starts with "admin" such as admin@mybusiness.com, then Yahoo! and AT&T will reject it. I have spent three hours on the phone with them trying to correct this error on their part with no result. It would take any decent programmer about 20 seconds to correct this pitiful error-checking mistake on their part. More evidence that this thing really is remarkably terrible.
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Check your email and confirm it through their ugly but effective confirmation email thing.

After confirming your email address, you can now add that email address to the outgoing authentication in your mail agent program (Outlook, IMail..whatever). All the other information that U-Verse supplies after this is correct, including secure port numbers (465 for outgoing SMTP port). However - you need to use your own ATT.NET email address and password for the secure STMP login.

Oh, one more thing...AT&T instructs you to use outbound.att.net for your SMTP settings. Remarkably, this is incorrect. Instead, use: smtp.att.yahoo.com

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If you work for AT&T U-Verse and are reading this and have finally corrected your bogus instructions, please post a reply stating: I'm sorry I wasted all of your time trying to figure this out and we really are a miserable service.

If you found this to be helpful, tell me. If anything I said is wrong, tell me. The internets are chocked full of bad information and I don't want this to part of the problem.

Many thanks for posting your hard-won knowledge. I just switched from DSL to Uverse today and couldn't send mail from any of the 6 non-AT&T accounts I'd already set up.
Finding the right SMTP server address here turned the trick.
Cheers -

Bob JAugust 26, 2013

I'm so glad you posted this. After scouring dozens of posts, this is the one that actually worked. You are correct about ATT India help; Suresh from ATT chat had no clue and admitted that they are not trained for this. I had no problem connecting to their server (green check during the test) I just failed the Send Test Email.
In my case, I clicked the "verify" next to my 3rd party email address. I received an email which I clicked the "Verify Email" link. I logged back into att.net and the unverified status was gone.
The test email passed and I can now send emails.
Thanks so much! Excellent post!

ElizabethSeptember 1, 2013

You are a God-send. Thank you so much. Almost four hours wasted trying to figure this out. Step by step was perfect. It takes a few minutes for all the systems to update before my email sent successfully, but now there are no problems at all! In Mac Mail, it does show my SMTP as (offline) but all the emails send just fine. Thank you times a million!

DoublehelixDecember 23, 2013

Brilliant. For whatever reason, this just broke recently for me (I'd had it configured slightly differently but working prior to this, so either a change on my domain hosting or U-verse's part probably caused that), but this was exactly the fix I needed.

ChrisJanuary 11, 2014

Thanks for taking the time to write this article. It was both entertaining and very helpful. I got my client working thanks to you. Many IT pro's on my campus could not figure it out and you've managed to save me my evening of searching for a solution. Many many thanks!!!!

Don GillespieMarch 7, 2014

How on earth did you figure this out!? At any rate, thanks for all the hard work. Valuable!!

Gene CarlisleMarch 12, 2014

Oh my God! Thank you SO MUCH. It actually works...

JanaJune 26, 2014

Your info was 100% accurate, and had I followed AT&T's instructions rather than yours, I never would have gotten my business email addresses going after installing uverse. Thanks!

Jack AvalonAugust 15, 2014

Brilliant! Many thanks.

Tony RomainAugust 22, 2014

You are a saint sir. I have no idea how you figured this out. Would be totally lost otherwise...

FredSeptember 30, 2014

Thanks for making me laugh in the middle of this frustrating process, really glad I found your page!

RobertoOctober 13, 2014

brilliant, very helpful, thank you

RickDecember 6, 2014

I went through this myself several years ago, since dumped AT&T but am now helping a family member get setup with their own domain on an AT&T network.
This writeup is perfect, I was dreading having to figure this out all over again. Plus really funny.
"unholy marriage portal of Yahoo! and AT&T", perfect description.

RubenJanuary 24, 2015

Great page!!! Spend one hour with ATT rep but could not fix it. Followed your page and it works!!
Thanks.

William LinMarch 31, 2015

I ran into problems with AT&T U Verse trying to send out email with myname@xxxx.com where xxx is my company name using Outlook 2013.
The good folks at AT&T said they couldn't do anything about it. Some at least tried, but eventually they turn you onto their Premium Tech Support that charge you $25 a month per computer, minimum 1 year commitment.
If this was the solution they offered to fix this problem, I would call it "robbery".
Thanks for putting this info out there. The high ups at AT&T are probably not too happy that you took away some of their potential customers (aka suckers)

Mark DavisOctober 5, 2015

Great Information. I just wasted 3 hours of my day on the phone with ATT and then was transferred to a pay for support line - which i hung up on. The information in this article worked perfectly. You would think their support should know about this. Thanks again for posting this.

rob steinmetzNovember 9, 2015

Thank you so much for fighting the good fight.
Friday I spent several hours trying to get my work address to work with ATT> I was on the line with support who called this complicated and suggest I "contact" my "webhost provider" finally told me this was out of scope.
I also found this page:
http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB402733&cv=801
Which is almost correct.
IN any event once I figured out that email addresses had to be verifier and how to do it is was simple.
I can now use
smtp.att.yahoo.com
smtp.mail.att.net
outbound.att.net
to send email.

StefaniDecember 30, 2015

OMG spoke to 3 tech support people before I started doing research on the internet. I am sooooooo glad I found your article. These guys in tech support are beyond stupidity. They told me the email I have been using for 20 years on cox I could no longer use and that I had to update my computer and software so I could use it, ahhhhhhh even I know that is false, then they said I have to call my email provider which I know to be false as well. Then they said I had to pay $50 an hour so their advanced tech support could help me, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh I finally told them I am more technical then you, I will figure it out and hung up.......Thanks again sooooooooo much for this article it saved my sanity.

JamesFebruary 27, 2017

After one year all okay with outbound.att.net email setting, last week blocked problem. Reset the uverse modem and ok for a few days. Problem returned last night. Called uverse this morning...clerk only able to recite port, server and ssl information. Said I needed to pay and use Tech360 - nope
Tested your smtp.att.yahoo.com - success. thanks much